Douwe is 5

Our son turned 5 the same day that Jeff turned 40, so we had two special birthdays to celebrate on the same weekend.   Douwe's been enthusiastic for mini-golf ever since his aunts and grandma took him mini-golfing for the first time last month.   He wanted a mini-golf birthday celebration and that is what we did.  A great time was had by all four of the boys.

Jeff turns 40

Jeff wanted a very special celebration for his milestone birthday and special is what he got!

 He reserved a special table in The Library Room upstairs of Topolobampo, which is adjacent to a special chef's kitchen.  We had an unforgettable dinner for 12, with several courses, each one as delightful as the next, and a visit from proprietors Deann and Rick!  They came bearing gifts for all (a new cookbook), and we think the special greeting had something to do with Deann's original last name:  Groen.   She is a first cousin to Jeff's father.   The whole evening was fun and festive.  

5 months

In May June and July, it was a whirlwind around the house with our special "son" living with us again. He didn't stay as long as in other years but we were glad to host him while we could.

Highlights:  lots of fishing, a few Boy Scout events, canoe trip, beach visits, art lessons, golf lessons, sibling visits. . . it was a whirlwind, so very little blogging for me.

In August, we spend the first 10 days on a great trip in Wyoming and Idaho, camping, resorting and canoeing.

Then a week or so before back to school, for Jess and Douwe!  Douwe is back at Montessori for morning pre-K classes, and I am taking a Literature class at Purdue University.  So it has been a fun transition into fall, but also, very little time taken for blogging.  

But I cannot omit a very special event, which I will post next.

Mother's Day

We had a picnic lunch at Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk for Mother's Day this afternoon, because it was so fun two years ago . . .the day was nice for climbing the dune, burying Steve in the sand and searching the "river" bank for dead fish and stuff.  Steve and his sister went in for a swim in the super cold lake. . .

Welcome back

We are a family of four again for the time being. . .Douwe is very excited.

River and Canyon

 A couple fun outdoor activities we did this spring. . .

several walks along the Little Calumet River which meanders a few blocks from our house.  It is very woodsy and seems to be far away from everything when you are right by the water.  
We found a great tree fort in the flood plain, and upgraded it a little.

 and we had a great canyon hike at the only canyon in Cook County, which also had the only cave
in the county. . .it was a very beautiful walk.  And a good place to wear our rainboots

Easter Baskets

On Easter morning, Jeff picked up Steve to spend the day with us . . and Douwe wanted to hide rather than find easter eggs.   So Douwe and I hid about 100 plastic eggs all over the yard and when Jeff and Steve arrived, they did the search.  Lots of jelly beans for all of us.

Home-lost isn't hopeless

Our favorite boy besides Douwe is without a home again now and we have been visiting him about once a week or so at the children's shelter where he is staying. Since I was a little kid, I have been introduced to many many fictional characters that somehow survive the worst nightmare of all: coping in a big world and strange new places without the benefit of having their very own parents nearby to protect or care for them. Here are some of the most memorable home-lost fictional children that come to mind, from books I read as a child, or books I have read in the last couple weeks. Recommended, especially if you are looking for a story that reminds us how it is not ridiculous to keep hoping that Love will work its magic eventually, somehow, in the lives of children who have been put into a seemingly hopeless situation . . .

Edgar Mint ---- The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall
Anne Shirley ---- Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Bud ---- Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis
Astrid Magnussen ---- White Oleander by Janet Fitch
Emily Starr ----- Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery
Sara Crewe ------ A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
the Pevensie kids---- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Harry Potter ---- The Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling
Fannie Price ----- Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre ---- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Stanley Yelnats ---- Holes by Louis Sachar
Gilly Hopkins ----- The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
Huck Finn ----- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
David Copperfield ----- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Mary Lennox ----- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Liesel Meminger ---- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Dorothy Gale ----- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
the Alden kids ---- The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Prince Dolor ----- The Little Lame Prince by Dinah Maria Mulock
Heidi ----- Heidi by Johanna Spyri
James Trotter ---- James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Rebecca ---- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin

Long weekend on the Gulf of Mexico

The three of us traveled for a long weekend to Anna Maria Island on the gulf coast of Florida in early February, to visit with Mom and Dad Groen and 5 of Mom's siblings and their spouses who were staying down there for a month.

We stayed at a beautiful lodging about two blocks from the Wielenga group, and I recommend this place to anyone . .across the street from the beach, and 2 nice pools on site. . .Tortuga Inn. We spent most of our time by the pool swimming, one morning at the beach, and one day at Myakka State Park to see the alligators on a boat ride. There were also a lot of birds to see, and a fun hike that was called a canopy walk because it had a structure high up in the canopy level of the trees.

Solar System and Outer Space

It has been a few months since my last update . .mainly because I never take a camera anywhere lately. . . .
here's a few shots from around the house in January . . Douwe got really interested in the solar system and kept building models all over the house. He ran out of little balls for the moons and used froot loops, and the black bracelet from Abby's wedding is having a second job as an asteroid belt.
The Magic School Bus book "Lost in the Solar System" gets main credit for getting Douwe curious. There is something fascinating and mind boggling about outer space once you start looking into it. All I knew from 5th grade science unit were a few terms like rotation, revolution, orbit, and the names not order of the nine planets. In the last few months we've checked out some books about Mars, Black Holes, Voyager, The Sun, and Asteroids, etc. and it all blows my mind. The vast distances, the dance moves of various orbits, the amounts of energy involved, it is all astronomical. We got a treat of a field trip to the Planetarium in Merrillville and saw a show about Mars, followed by a simulation of the night sky that day. It is so complicated, I wonder how scientists can even figure all this stuff out. How can radio waves travel so far to send photos from so far away? Most of it is over my head.

Weekend Guests

Douwe is thrilled when we have Steve for a visit once a month and this time we took it up a notch and invited one of Steve's younger brothers too . . . for those of you who knew Steve when he was six or seven . .you might say, hey that is Steve! . .

They are all having fun playing trains and Kapla and taping Zombie Survival tips videos for You Tube.

Steve's little brother disappeared for a few minutes before supper and it turned out he decided Douwe's sloppy bedroom needed a tidying up . . I've never seen it look so nice! He had all the blankets turned out and the books that were on the floor next to the bed were stacked up biggest to smallest on the side table. . he just did that for fun! I was quite impressed.

Although a tornado hit it this morning, or was it a hurricane or fire, you never know, but here's the Kapla structure they were building last night:

Snow is here!

Turning the hearts

"And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Luke 1:17

While reading the book of Malachi a few weeks ago, I left with the last verse of the short last chapter of the short last book of the Old Testament stuck in my memory: “Look, I am sending you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord arrives. His preaching will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers. Otherwise I will come and strike the land with a curse.” Luke 1 refers to this prophecy as it prepares Zechariah for the coming of his own son.

I picked out an old dusty book from a family member's library a few years ago, and have read it several times . . The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. It is one of those little books that becomes a special friend to me, because it puts so well into words a situation that is at the source of so much interpersonal grief: the inability of adults to fully remember what it was like to be a little child. So many of the intense emotional encounters that happen in a house between a child and a parent are labeled without question as the child being bad or naughty, when often the reality is that a parent is blind to the truth that the child is being a normal child with limited skill and practice of self-control. The parent can't see it and stay calm because the parent is being overwhelmed by an unremembered time when they were the same age as their child, doing the same childish things, and they did not have a parent who had a heart turned toward them to give comfort and affection. They are reacting in the present to a time twenty or thirty years past that they did not hear consistent, gentle, discipling words that patiently teach and model about expressing behavior and feelings with self-control (an art that takes humans a lifetime to master), or that they did not receive a reassurance that words of love with a hug is available no matter how immaturely a child behaves. Miller says that the only way we can keep from collapsing under the rage and grief of these unremembered memories that invade us as we parent our own children is to maintain the belief that what happened to us was good for us, and what we are currently doing to our children is good for them too.

I have the gift (or curse) of having a memory of what it is like to be a child. I kept a diary for several different years, and I still have those writings. As an adult, I have written out a lot of the stories and events I remember, and I have been able to put into words what I was learning and noticing and believing and feeling at the time that different things happened. It is a mystery to me how long term memory works, because of course only certain experiences get stored in there and I have no idea what makes a person's particular brain choose some things and not another for long term memory storage. In my own life it seems to me I stored many things to do with "danger." So maybe our long term memories save things that will help us survive if something "dangerous" comes our way again.

I think one of the reasons God became a human person Jesus, starting from embryo, fetus, and newborn, is to fulfill the prophecy of Malachi 4. God can know everything, but he did not feel what it feels like to be a dependent and needy and vulnerable child until he became one. Before he knew what it was like, his heart was not fully ready to turn towards his children. Hebrews talks of Jesus needing to learn obedience, so it is ok, I think, to imagine that God knew he had some living and learning to do in order to carry out his intent to redeem humanity from the curse of death on their behalf. A father's (or mother's) heart turned toward a child is a pre-requisite to a child's heart turning toward a parent, or even to God. God did not skip the pre-requisite and neither can we, if we are committed to seeing children grow into whole-hearted lovers of siblings, friends, spouses and God. I also think that the words of ultimate suffering that were said by Jesus on the cross: "My God, My God, Why have you abandoned me?" tell us that the worst most hellish place for the human heart to go is into the fully aware experience of the reality that we are rejected unwanted hated and ignored by the father or mother that we depend on for life, safety, identity, but who has turned a back to us and our plight. I am confident that because Christ lived and suffered as a human infant, and child, and adult, and because of his own alienating experience of death (and because his heart was never ignorant or calloused or hardened or cauterized to the pain of it), that he totally understands and empathizes with the misery, fear, alienation, brokenness and terror of being a vulnerable human. His heart is now forever softened and turned to us in our condition and he is intending to soften our own hearts to our condition, so that we realize that we have broken wounded hearts, so we come to him as needy miserable children who are crying for comfort and healing.

This is an article that I really like because it talks a lot about how to practice parenting that cares primarily about hearts being turned to one another, and only secondarily about visible behavior and acting right. LLLI Gentle Discipline In general, this is what Jeff and I have been working really hard to practice, and after four to six years of trying it out with Steve some years and Douwe other years, I have to say it is fruitful and worth trying out. It makes me cry a lot, because this style requires me take a minute to feel during a hard moment how much I would rather yell or hit or insult my child with a withering label, and then stop myself as I remembered how it felt to be standing there as a child when that was happening to me. There is great wrong that happens between humans, and things to be angry and sad about, but not all caused by our children that we should be punishing them for it, or even ourselves, or even our own parents. The hearts of the fathers have been hardened towards children (and vice versa) for many many many generations, but God has made a radical change to the pattern by becoming a human child himself, and so our parental hearts can be softened as we think of Jesus being a baby, a toddler, a 6 year old. Our hearts can identify with Mary as she struggled to reconcile two seemingly opposite approaches to relating to someone: what she was familiar with when it came to handling a child, and what she believed about the honor and respect that a person gives to God. Maybe God was teaching her and us that the approach would be the same whether we are in a room navigating our relationship with Jesus or with our two year old.